Fiction, Games, and Game Design

Preliminary D&D 5e Customizable Character Sheet

Every character sheet I’ve ever seen had one major flaw: it was never suitable for every character the game could make. Mages need spell space (or have lots of powers). Fighters have lots of weapons, gadgeteers have lots of gadgets, and so on. One enterprising HackMaster Basic player made customized character sheets for each of the four classes in that book simply to get around that problem.

That was the last straw for me, so I designed some character sheets for the games we play most with three major goals in mind:

Earth- and wallet-friendliness. In other words: cheap to print.

Only force the positioning of things that will be present on every character or are tedious to hand-write every time: stat blocks; name, race, age, etc.; skills; and so forth.

User-customizable depending on player taste and character class, if applicable. This includes having the lowest item on the front page of the D&D sheet be the column headings of the weapons table. That way it as long as needed, no more or less, yet still details out the math for new players and for ease of making changes as needed (leveling, new magic items, increases in skills, etc.).

With the release of D&D Basic, our Encounters group has decided to give 5e a try next season. I’ll be GMing again, but I decided to make a few characters to learn the system, and my wife will of course be playing, so I adapted my 4e character sheet for her. I have posted the result to scribd as usual, but expect it to change when the Player’s Handbook releases. Please let me know what you think, because I’m always looking to improve my game aids.

For the sake of spell-chuckers, I created a separate grimoire, adapted from the one I made for HackMaster 5e nearly two years ago. The only differences are that I removed the SP column since D&D doesn’t use Spell Points, and renamed the “Secs” column “Time” since casting times in HackMaster are always in seconds, but in D&D vary from Bonus Action to an hour or more. The space freed by the loss of the SP column was split between the Time and Effects columns.

As always, the links for both sheets are also available on my Downloads page.